When my dad was in university in the 50s, then just a half century earlier people had been walking around in Edwardian apparel and Teddy Roosevelt mediated an end to the Japan/Russia war; seventy years before the Indian wars were coming to an end, and 80+ years before was the Civil War.
Chronologically, the corresponding events for a current university student might be the Cuban Missile Crisis, WWII and the Roaring Twenties.
Somehow, the latter events don’t seem as far removed in time to me as the Edwardian age, cowboys and Indians and the Civil War might have been to someone living in the 50s.
It’s very simple. Anything you remember isn’t the past. Anything your parents remember that they told you about is the recent past. Anything you only learned about from books/archives/classes is history.
I grew up in the 50’s and the Edwardian Age, Civil War and cowboys and indians were all “history.” The Great Depression and World War II were the recent past.
Well, as an example of what I’m talking about, I browsed about halfway through The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (published in 1966) and it seemed like the historian had to go to some lengths to re-create the customs, attitudes and conditions of a vanished world of just 50+ years before, in a way that wouldn’t seem to me to be so necessary when going back from our time back to the halycon days when Ike was carrying his own golf clubs. Ifyaknowhatteyemean.
Events of the first half of the 20th Century might not seem so removed because much of it was captured on film, unlike those distant points in “history.” Just a thought.
It always amazed me to think when my great grandfather was a kid/ young man that he got around in a horse and buggy.
When he was young he bought himself 600 acres outside of Gatesville Texas. I remember when I used to go see him as a kid that buggy that he and his wife used to get there still sat right out front of his house.
It was like “Little House on The Prairie” for real. So in my mind I feel I’ve had a tactile relationship with that of the 19th century. (Just before the turn of it anyway.)
Now my kids aren’t going to get that kind of relationship with history. In fact my kids wont ever know anybody who didn’t grow up with an auto of some sort.
It’s also slightly amusing to think that my 15yo doesn’t know of a world where “The Simpsons” didn’t exist.
As young boys in the 1960s, my friends and I still considered World War II recent history, although we understood that the Germans and Japanese weren’t our enemies anymore. Still at an age where we “played army” (“big” meaning to go outside and fight pretend battles, “little” meaning with toy soldiers) we usually sided up as Germans and Americans, nevertheless.
The rate of cultural change isn’t constant. The difference in popular music between, say, 1950 and 1970 seems a thousand times greater than that between 1970 and 1990, or even 2009. So to express it in terms of this thread, 1970 doesn’t seem nearly as long ago with regard to popular music as, at that time, 1950 seemed. I think much the same thing can be said of motion pictures. Up to about 1965, dramatic films usually had a rather stilted affect (think any b&w crime drama from the era).
I think that television fundamentally altered the way we view the past such that the recent past seems much more contemporary such as the 60s whereas anything pre-television is another world made opaque by an impassable threshold.
I should feel older than I do (I’m 51). On the other hand, there were definitely some older parents in my line of descent. My great-grandfather was born in 1842 and was a sergeant in the Civil War, after which he homesteaded in Kansas. That’s only three generations not counting me. My g.g.father had about thirteen kids of whom my grandfather was the next-to-youngest. His wife, my grandmother, was born 1888 in Utah, which wasn’t admitted as a state for eight more years.
it’s just a matter of technology…
The change between 1900 to 1950 was the biggest leap in human history. From horses to cars, from primitive power to electricity,from non-existant medical care to modern hospitals, and most importantly— from outhouse to flush toilets!
The technological changes between 1950 to today are not as earth-shaking.If you sent a child born today back to the 1950’s he could still function in society. He could drive a car and flush the toilet. But send a child born in 1950, back to 1910, and he wouldn’t know how to ride a horse or wipe his butt…
on the other hand, if you sent a child born in 1900 back to 1850, he could also function pretty well in society, and wouldnt think that the past was so far away…
So ,yeah,as the OP says… for his father, the past seemed farther away, because the technology was farther removed from what he knew
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Some say that before the Renaissance people often supposed that the distant future and the distant past would look and feel the same, and some even thought it all repeated in a cycle several lifetimes long. But as technology started moving quickly enough for people to be aware of its change, this view declined. Now it is very obvious. If you can’t reasonably wonder what your parents posted about on the Web, you can’t picture things as static. Just the other day we were on vacation, and I sent our daughter a cell phone picture of Mrs. Napier wirelessly facebooking in the hotel room. Not long ago, about this, people would have said, “Wait, you took a picture with a telephone? What was that other stuff??”
It’s the other way around for me. To follow up on some more recent posts, I am almost at an age which is half the amount of time from Lincoln’s assassination to my birthdate:
47 ~ 1/2 (1962-1865).
48 1/2 of course is the actual figure in question. To put it another way, there were people alive when I was born who were alive during the Civil War, and some undoubtedly remembered it. He didn’t get killed all that long ago.
